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Updated: June 29, 2025
Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe the big, white banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch craft with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake. That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake.
Cataracts countless Churchill River is one succession of cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chains of lakes by which you can go from the Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once lifting your canoe; quaking muskegs areas of amber stagnant water full of what the Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and sand overgrown with coarse goose grass and "the reed that grows like a tree," muskrat reed, a tasseled corn-like tufted growth sixteen feet high areas of such muskeg mile upon mile.
I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up the story of a furtrader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a hole clean the size of a man's fist. Quick as a flash, the head man was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of butter.
East of Devil's Point, the Saskatchewan breaks from its river bed and is lost for a hundred and fifty miles through a country of pure muskeg, quaking silt soft as sponge, overgrown with reed and goose grass. Here are not even low banks; there are no banks at all. Canoes are on a level with the land, and reeds sixteen feet high line the aisled water channels.
Then I growled with satisfaction as almost simultaneously I heard a sound there was no mistaking, the crunch of a forty-four bullet smashing through flesh and bone. The bear was down, straggling among the weed, and plunging straight through the muskeg I fell upon it, and, after burning another cartridge with the muzzle against the flesh, I drove the long knife in to the hilt.
The muskeg was beating him, and he hated to be beaten. He was bringing in General Manager Fahey to have a look at things. It was important to awaken the sympathy of the General Manager, if, indeed, this could be accomplished.
Talking almost incessantly to distract the other's attention, A'tim led the way straight for his muskeg trap. "There is some lovely blue-joint grass on the other side of this beautiful little plain," he said as they came to the tamarack border of the swamp. "Is it safe crossing?" asked Shag. "Quite safe," answered the Dog-Wolf; "there is not a mud spot to be seen you will scarce wet a shin.
But although I knew the last ten or twelve miles of my drive fairly well, I was also aware of the fact that there were in it tricky spots forkings of mere trails in muskeg bush where leaving the beaten log-track might mean as much as being lost. So I looked at my watch again and shook the lines over Peter's back. The first six miles had taken me nearly fifty minutes.
North of Cumberland Lake to the next fur post is a trifling run of two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles by dog-train to Lac du Brochet or Reindeer Lake more muskeg cut by limestone and granite ridges. Here you can measure four hundred miles east or west and not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on the west and Hudson's Bay on the east.
It is a safe wager that the profits on the millions upon millions of little pelts hundreds of thousands of muskrat are taken out of this muskeg alone exceed by a hundredfold the profits on the larger furs of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross fox and marten. Look at the map again!
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